


sometimes a dream is enough

by Resamille



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, M/M, Pining Keith (Voltron), Post-War, mentions of other characters but not worth tagging, sorry lance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-30
Updated: 2017-05-30
Packaged: 2018-11-06 19:28:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11042763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Resamille/pseuds/Resamille
Summary: Keith feels the ache of Lance's passing even before he's gone. It weighs on his heart like the secrets he holds there: that he loves Lance.





	sometimes a dream is enough

**Author's Note:**

  * For [florfering](https://archiveofourown.org/users/florfering/gifts).



It's not in the way they all expected.

There's no explosion, no hero's end. It's not the soldier's last stand, blazing guns and last resorts. It's not some self-sacrificing mentality deserving of the martyr Lance always thought he was. It's not the final battle fighting the Galra, not even close. It's no injury of war, though of which there have been many.

No. Not the death worthy of Lance.

It's the blood staining his hand after a coughing fit that wracked his frame. It's the way his muscles failed and he was always just a bit too skinny, bones peeking from under too-taut skin. It's the ragged breathing, wet and poisoned by his own body. It's how the team lingered by his bedside when he was too weak to get up, as if meager friendship can ease the pain of dying.

No, it's not war.

It's cancer.

It's a truth they all know in their hearts, but something never spoken, at least not to Keith's ears.

Part of him wants to only remember a Lance who constantly smiled—a boy made sun-kissed from the Cuban heat, turned warrior by fate, and turned family by the trust between brothers-in-arms. Part of Keith only wants to know Lance at his best: sharpshooter, laughter incarnate, unattainably beautiful.

But he also wants to remember this. These soft moments shared between them when Lance breaks apart, mourning the life he would have lived if the universe weren't quite so cruel. Mourning the fact he won't get to say goodbye to his family, because the battle that won the war also damaged the castle beyond repair, so they can't wormhole home. They won't make it back it time.

It's too late for Lance.

And the knowledge of it shows in the way Lance throws a bony arm over his eyes and lets the tears roll down his cheeks while Keith wears his knees to soreness as he sits at Lance's side and clutches his hand. For comfort, maybe. Or selfishness. The fingers tremble in his own, and Keith holds tighter, hoping that maybe his grip will keep the tiny shake from shattering his heart. It doesn't work.

Keith holds in his own tears. He saves them for the moments he's left to himself, curled on his side in Lance's bed and, through a hazy gaze, watching the shallow rise-and-fall of Lance's chest as he sleeps. He doesn't know how much time he has left to memorize the curve of Lance's jaw, cheeks a little more hollow with each passing day, or the slope of his neck, or the delicate press of his shoulder against Keith's chest because the castle beds aren't made for two people.

When he's counting Lance's breaths, a measure of the time he has left that transcends petty arguments about seconds and ticks, Keith finds himself missing the heartbeats stolen from Lance's future. He mourns not for Lance, but in place of Lance. There will be time for mourning him later, when his body is cold and blood stilled, but now is the time for final recollections, last-chance promises, and maybe, maybe, as Keith whispers through the silent tears, confessions.

But Lance is in a fitful sleep, eyelids twitching with dark dreams, and Keith's words fall like dead things to the sheets, burrowing and sticking in the fabric.

Eventually, though the tears never dry, they turn lighter, and Keith breathes in the scent of Lance and sick and futures unspoken.

When he wakes, Lance's body is still.

Keith doesn't cry. Not as the others, with wet cheeks, attempt to revitalize him by putting him in one of the healing pods. It's hopeless, but there's a sense of foreboding desolation, as if none of them can quite accept this hideous truth. Like they can't believe the world is so twisted as to take Lance from them when they were so, so close.

It could be worse, Keith supposes. They could have lost Lance in the beginning, and scrambled to find a new Blue Paladin.

But instead they saw at him at his brightest. Like a star, he shone in the way he flew, the way he fought, the way he _cared_. And like romantic fools, they all fell for Lance's charisma, loved him in his smile, let his flirting charm them into friendship, and seamlessly, they were inevitably a team. Lance was as much a part of each of them as their lions are. Maybe that's worse, to care so deeply, love so much, and then watch, like all stars, as Lance went supernova.

With a shockingly stoic nature, Keith goes to Lance's family, when they finally get back. Lance made him promise. Together he and Hunk deliver the news. He knows that Hunk's bawling is far closer to what Lance's family is looking for: comfort in the evidence that others know their pain. But they gave up on Lance returning years ago, and how is Keith supposed to tell them that he'd fallen in love with their son, their brother? How does he admit his greatest regret is keeping the burden of his heart to himself, because now it weighs so heavily in his chest. Too tight in his body, the emotions tangle and tug, knots on his ribs that pull taut and painful, keep him caught with no way to escape.

Because the one person who needs to hear those words cannot. What good does telling Lance's family do except warrant disgusting pity and sympathetic notions? Keith has no need for those. He needs Lance.

Lance is gone.

He and Hunk leave Lance's few things with his family. Along with the things he went into space with, so many years ago, they also leave the trinkets and souvenirs Lance has collected while in the vast. Hunk doesn't mention the fact Lance's jacket is missing. Keith is grateful. Lance's family gets the greatest gift of all—closure—they can bear to miss a simple article of clothing.

It's not the death Lance deserves.

He was a hero, a soldier and a friend. He was stardust and solar eclipses, blocking out the world Keith so often let get to him. He was the boy Keith loved.

He deserves a hero's welcome home. He deserves to grow old, happy and accomplished in his life, and die surrounded by family. At the very least, he deserves the martyr's fame, some necessary forfeit to win the day. He deserves to be in Keith's place.

He didn't deserve to be eaten away by sickness until his body failed him and mind slipped to nothingness.

Keith wishes down to the marrow of his bones that it really was him who died instead. There's a family that waited for Lance's return. Keith has nothing. He curls around Lance's jacket, clutching at the fabric while it soaks with his tears, in his room on the Castle of Lions, because Keith has nowhere else to go. How is he supposed to go on living in a world that Lance isn't in?

The universe didn't fucking deserve Lance.

It didn't deserve his smiles, his laughter, his kindness.

Keith didn't deserve his smiles, his laughter, his _kindness_.

It's not in the way they all expected. The team was supposed to stick together after the war. Instead they fall apart.

Allura keeps Keith alive, just barely, forcing him to eat and sleep.

His breaths—the true marks of the passage of time—echo in the quiet room as Keith clutches at the jacket around his shoulders and steps into the pod.

He had Allura teach him, once, feigning curiosity, about how the cryopods functions, how to program them to his will.

Keith steps into the pod, the exhale of his breath fogging the glass before his eyes slip closed and darkness envelopes his being.

Maybe after he's been asleep for a very long time, then the pain of losing Lance won't sting so much like knives on his slow-beating heart.

A very long time... Maybe he'll dream of Lance.

Maybe it won't be a dream.

 

**Author's Note:**

> based loosely off this pic: http://avocatdelapoursuite.tumblr.com/post/161190721082/nobody-ever-gets-what-they-want-anyway  
> but more accurately based off a debate about this pic from discord, which, in summary, was as follows:  
> you: pining keith  
> someone else: dead lance  
> me, an intellectual: both  
> I blame Fluff.  
> Title from The Crimson Crown by Cinda Williams Chima.


End file.
